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Making A Difference – Thoughts, Observations and Opinions
This is Dave Brock’s Blog.
It offers my views on a variety of business, sales, marketing, and leadership topic. My goal is to make a difference for you, the reader, in both your professional and personal lives.
Latest Posts
Talking With ChatGPT Mirrors Our Human Conversations
Have you ever noticed how the way we work with ChatGPT and other LLMs tends to mirror so many of our customer and internal conversations? Too often, it might be similar to talking with a very knowledgeable person who is unengaged, uncaring, aloof. The typical conversation with a LLM is very one sided. It’s not very interested in us, it seems to be in a rush, as if it has someone or something more important to work with. While it doesn’t ignore us, like so many customers or others do, it answers so directly it seems impatient. And it […]
What Is Your Willingness To Be Uncomfortable?
We live in a world of “discomfort.” And our natural tendencies are to actively avoid or escape discomfort or uncomfortable situations. Our discomfort tends to arise when things aren’t happening the way we expected them to happen. We expect a certain response or reaction in a conversation, and we get something entirely different from what we may have wanted or hoped for. We are doing our work but things aren’t working. We are focused on achieving our goals, yet we are not achieving them. We aren’t getting the “support” we had hoped to get. Or we may be doing everything […]
Being Present
This is one of those knee jerk reaction posts. Two things happened in the past few days. I attended a conference. I was sitting toward the back of the room, there were about 100 people arrayed around tables watching the speaker. The speaker was a noted expert in the subject area. People had paid a lot of money just to hear that speaker (over $1K). As I looked around the audience, few eyes were on the speaker. Most eyes were cast downward, at their devices. Whether it was a mobile, tablet, laptop, they focused on their devices. Every once in […]
The Boring Work That Enables Us To Do The Tough Work
Recently, in speaking with a colleague, he was showing me a series of AI prompts to help sellers do deep research on customers, their markets, issues, and so forth. What might have taken someone a couple of hours to do, AI enabled it to be completed in about 2 seconds. And the quality of the output was pretty good. We have all sorts of tools that free us up from doing the boring and tedious work. Work that is uninspiring, we just have to grind it out. Work that. often, takes time away from higher return efforts like meeting with […]
FOMU, Seller Style
First, those of you who know me well, know my preferred acronym is FOFU, but FOMU is the Fear Of Messing Up. FOMU, from the customers’ perspectives has been nicely articulated my friends, Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna. I’ve written about Buyer FOMU incessantly, helping buyers make sense of what they face, developing their confidence they are doing the right thing is critical for their success, and, ultimately, ours. But until I attended an event last week, I never thought very deeply about the FOMU we as sellers and leaders experience. On reflection, FOMU is a part of our lives, […]
“Sales Theater”
Or Theatre depending on where you live 😉 Over the past few weeks, I’ve had two experiences in Sales Theater. I’ve struggled in thinking about them, whether they were dark dramas or unintended comedies. Both were choreographed from the same playbook, I’ll describe the second since it was only a couple of days ago. I was at a conference of about 150 CROs, RevOps, RevEnablement leaders. They keynote speaker mounted the stage, following a dramatic video. He was followed by his own cinematographer, I suspect so his performance could go down in history. There were the dramatic pauses, the positioning, […]